Dumneazu

Wednesday, December 06, 2017

I grew up in the USA during the cold war era. As a kid back in the 1960s, my impression of "Russia" was that it was a scary place inhabited by something called "communists" who operated out of a fortress called "the Kremlin" in someplace identified as 'Moscow.' It was not a place any child of the Cold War ever imagined visiting. Russia terrified us: it was Lex Luthor, the Joker, Khruschev banging his shoe at the UN, Red submarines lurking around Cuba. It represented everything that Superman and Batman and all the other superheros stood against. My family tradition was not much help. My Grandfather had left Bessarabia (today's Republic of Moldova) after serving in the Tsar's army in World War One, and his story of emigrating to the USA began with a series of bloody pogroms in his youth and ended with him fleeing the Ukraine by soaking his overcoat in the freezing waters of the River Bug and using his frozen coat as a sled to skid across the ice into Romania. Whenever my Grandfather mentioned "Russia" it was generally accompanied by ritualistic spitting. My Mom was from Hungary - not much of am improvement in public relations from her or from the refugee 1956ers living in our basement apartment in the Bronx. No, I was not raised to imagine ever visiting Moscow. Which is why I was delighted to step off an Aeroflot plane last week and find myself in... Moscow!

No collusion... absolutely no collusion at all!

The Balassi Institute - which represents Hungarian culture worldwide - brought Di Naye Kapelye over to perform a concert as part of a series of Yiddish culture hosted by Moscow's Eshkolot Center, a major Jewish educational initiative in Moscow. Moscow has over 100,000 Jews living in it - not bad, considering that the city was outside the traditional Pale of Settlement where Jews were allowed to settle, and as such Jewish presence there is a 20th century phenomenon, reflecting roots in other parts of the empire and a gradual loosening of traditional life ways, such as musical traditions and Yiddish language. In response, Moscow (And St. Pete'sburg, to be fair) has a lot of enthusiastic young people learning Yiddish and taking a very active interest in the roots of Ashkenazic culture. Which is to say the concert went very well - the crowd knew what we were doing, and took me for my word when I told them that a DNK concert is not a music museum - they got up and danced. We had brought my small cimbalom as cabin baggage on the plane - there are actually no cimbaloms for rent or lending in all of Moscow. Which was interesting because there were about a dozen Hasids on our flight, and one of them had a fiddle, and we ended up talking in Yiddish at the end of the flight. they had been to Dej in Romania for a Hasidic pilgrimage gathering, and were off to Hashem-knows-where in Russia for another.

Di Naye Kapelye at full blast.

Moscow itself is overwhelming, even to a New Yorker like myself. It is huge - the scale of the city is mind boggling. It had twice the population of New York city, and since it is not confined to a series of islands, it gives a sense of infinite urban growth. Moscow doesn't fade off into suburbs - its all tall buildings. The downtown area seems endless, and the city was originally designed to impress visitor's with - serially - the Tsar's greatness, the Soviet's Greatness, and eventually, the Oligarchy's Greatness.

Window of GUM dept store.

I can now completely understand why Donald Trump would be so impressed by this city: it is built by, and for, supernaturally wealthy billionaires, full of shiny luxury shops, humongous ministry buildings, and eight lane boulevards. To use a New York frame of description, imagine Park Avenue mixed with Washington DC and maintained by the people who do the lights for Disneyland.

The GUM department store and outdoor Christmas market in Red Square.

We didn't have much free time to sight-see - such is the gigging musicians' life - but on the way to our concert Sasha from the Balassi Institute had our van driver detour so we could experience Red Square. There it was: the Kremlin in all its red revolutionary glory, the Church of St. Basil, and best of all: Lenin's tomb. It was too late to get into see the century old pickled remains of the mastermind of the Communist Revolution. So I did what any self respecting left-leaning American-Hungarian Yiddishist would do one hundred years after the October Revolution: I took a selfie.

Do not wake up Lenin!

Moscow is also expensive: very very expensive. You need to visit an ATM machine merely to walk into a McDonald's. Sorry, but no food porn, no close ups of twenty varieties of dumplings or tips on where to get the best blinis. We stopped in a supermarket, I bought some Russian black bread and ate a salami I brought from home for the weekend. You gotta remember: we musicians do gigs to make money, not spend it in one of the world's most expensive cities. The Balassi people were good enough to take us to an upscale cafeteria on the night of the concert, so we did not go hungry...

The Workers demand blintzes!

I put edin and edin together and got dva: blini is the equivalent to blintze. Man, this place was getting way to close to home. And almost as quickly as we had come, we were gone: back to Budapest! It is Karacsony time in Hungary: two days in Moscow, a three hour flight and bingo! And today in Hungary is Santa Claus Day - Mikulas - for all of you waiting for a Jolly fellow with gifts. We went to the big Holiday market downtown and caught a set of fine gaida music from Bulgaria played by a young group from the village of Kalofer. Gaida is my joint.... nothing says Xmas like sheepskin bagpipes.

And within one week I will be gone yet again: flying to New York (OK... Newark) next week for a month and a half. Chances are the next post on the blog will have either Shake Shack or Japanese food waving in your faces. Check in on the Yiddish New York festival: there will be a lunchtime showing of the film "Soul Exodus" as part of the video program. And afterwards, maybe we can grab a slice of pizza... or a blintz!

Saturday, November 18, 2017

The Tranzit House (Casa Tranzit / Tranzit Haz) is a cultural center that opened twenty years ago in the Transylvanian city of Cluj ( in Hungarian: Kolozsvar) Romania. Originally it was the Poalei Tzaddik orthodox Jewish synagogue, but by 1990 the Cluj Jewish community had shrunk to about 200 and had few resources to maintain the many abandoned synagogues in the city. When I first saw the shul it was a miserable ruin - broken windows, collapsed roof - hidden in a courtyard along the Somes river in downtown Cluj. Csilla Konczei, an anthropologist known for studies of ethnic minority folk culture in Transylvania, established the Tranzit foundation to promote multi-ethnic and independent arts, rented the abandoned building on Strada Baritiu, and set about restoring the building as a cultural center. When they formally opened the restored shul as a performance space in 1997, Di Naye Kapelye was invited to play on a bill that included the Palatka Band. This year, I was invited back to play again to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the opening.

Tranzit House, Str. Baritiu Nr. 16.

Before the concert they showed a bit of video of our performance in 1997. Twenty years ago we were a smaller band, and I was twenty years younger. It seemed a bit cruel to have a twenty foot tall digital image of my younger self on the wall for instant comparison with the grubby old Jewish guy scraping away on a fiddle just below it. For this gig there wasn't the budget to bring Di Nayes so I played with a couple of younger Hungarian folk musicians from Cluj and with a couple of hours of practice we managed to pull off a set.

Di Naye Kapelye, Tranzit Haz, 1997

Even when there isn't a big budget I am willing to play Cluj just to underwrite a free visit. It is my favorite town in Transylvania, my second home in Europe, and a lot of my warmest friends are there. Also the memories of friends who are no longer among us - Saska Jeno, the Armenian Priest of Szamosujvar, Carmen Titrus, the daughter of the great Gypsy violinist Alexander Titrus, the Palatka fiddler Marton Kodoba, and my fiddle mentor Berki "Arus" Ferenc: Feribacsi from Mera. I miss them all, and when I play in Cluj I feel like I am presenting a concert for ghosts. Don't get em wrong - I'm fine with the living who come to concerts. They pay for tickets, at least.

Éljen Árus!

Also, there is the flea market - the Oser de Haine - on Saturday morning. The Cluj flea marlet used to be a huge sprawling mudfest of used clothing, motorcycle parts, and live rabbits for sale that spread over several kilometers of an outlying district of Cluj and snaked along the railway tracks to add a frisson of danger as one browsed amid whooshing trains and stray dogs along the tracks. Even today the streets leading to the market are clogged with people peddling stuff.

Better than Walmart

Inside the market there is a lot of stuff that would rate as "junk" to some but treasure to others. People still depend on bargain hunting in Romania, and used clothes are a big seller, as is kitchen equiptment, gardening tools, and abandoned creepy dolls that could be in an art school film class project.

We didn't get to visit the Fair at Negreni this year, but I managed to make up for it by picking up a knife sharpening stone and three hemostats for less than five Euros. I checked around just in case anybody was selling eighty year old diatonic accordions - if a vintage single row diatonic Monarch in repairable condition is ever going to show up, this is where it ought to be. And then... lunch!

Be sure to visit the food court on the lower level!

Let's be honest - I was as guilty as anyone of promoting Romania during the 1990s as the last wild and primitive place in Europe, full of grimy factories, depressing block flats, pristine villages and food that would pass as inedible in a Brazilian prison. Back then horse carts did roll around downtown and sheep grazed in the city parks... but no more. And remember: nobody wants to be called the last primitive place in Europe.

Civilized dining in classy surroundings.

I have since watched Romania surpass Hungary in total amount of trendy cafes, Neapolitan pizza, middle eastern lunch joints, internet wifi speed, wild trout streams, and anti-corruption laws. You really have to search for anything that reminds you on Romania as it was in the grey 1990s. The flea market is that place.

Chef's special: meat with no kale and no quinoa.

To be honest, I love eating at the flea market, or anywhere Romanians go to eat mititei, also called "mici" which can, justifiably, be called "primitive" As far as ground meatwads go, the Romanian version is the least civilized, compared to Bosnian cevapi, Turkish kofte, Serbian cevapcici, and even the dreaded cuminburger Bulgarian kebabche. Its basically a log of ground cow, garlic, and salt made rubbery buy the addition of soda bicarbonate, eaten with bread and mustard. But when in Romania, do as the Romanians do: eat the mici!

Monday, October 16, 2017

Nearly an entire summer passed without a blog update, perhaps the most gaping lacunae in the history of this blog. I should hang my head in shame, but it has been a low key summer: no grand travel plans, a tight economy, and a scorching midsummer heatwave made sure we didn't stray far from Hungary. No new Balkan wars broke out, no sea of refugees flooded Hungary's borders, nobody poisoned the paprika this year. Our football squad lost a World Cup qualifier to Andorra (which had not won an international match in 13 years.) Our politicians are still abject sleazebags and thieves, and our women are beautiful. There are too many tourists and they are badly dressed and loud at night. There, that's it. That's Hungary in 2017. How many posts about the corner pastry shop can anybody bear? So, no new updates. Who the heck still blogs anymore in this age of Facebook and Twitter? (Twitter? Abject sleazebags.) And now, just to let you know I am alive...

Note: No cakes were eaten during the maintenance of this blog...

Let me tell you about my corner pastry shop! Our "staycation" was marked by the opening of a new cafe and bakery at our local market: The Lud (The Goose) Cafe is run by the woman who runs the quality vegetable stand at the Klauzal ter market, and it is worth the trip in itself. Apart from serving the most affordable coffee in Budapest they bake a lot of their goods in-house, and feature old school cakes like Rigo Jancsi and Dobos Torta that you can't find in Budapest pastry shops any more without the intrusive fusion touch of some chef who has watched too may cake baking reality TV shows. At the Lud the Dobos cake has a hard caramel topping, and the Rigo is dark chocolate. It ain't retro, its real. The Lud is our new afternoon caffeine refill station.

Roast goose carcass for lunch!

A couple of doors down from the market is the legendary Kadar Etkezde, a lunch-only restaurant that specializes in the untrendy and unhealthy staples of Hungarian food that are quickly being forgotten by a generation of young chefs. Yes, it is actually hard to find good old Hungarian food in Budapest. The old "Grandma's Sunday lunch" stuff started disappearing as soon as Grandma got a microwave and a deep fat fryer for Christmas. Our little secret, which I will share with you, is that there is one day a week when the Kadar's revolving menu features a goose pilaf using bits left over from the geese they use for their goose leg and the goose meatloaf that they serve on top of their solet, the Hungarian Jewish version of cholent that is the specialty of the house at Kadar. (I could tell you which day, but then I would have to shoot you)

Solet with goose "meatball" at Kadar

On that day the goose pilaf is absolutely the thing to order, but if you suppose that you live just across the street, and you order it to take out because you were too lazy to make lunch that day, and they know you as a local who shows up with fashionable foreign ethnomusicologist guests from time to time, they give you a whopping huge portion consisting of an half a roast goose carcass and three goose wings on pilaf. After stripping the meat off the bones I had enough for three full meals of roast goose (including the spongy and slimy black goose lungs which, I discovered, are really tasty and I want to eat them for breakfast every day.

Pide, the Turkish entry into the world Pizza competition.

We don't really go out to eat very much besides the occasional 30 meter trek to Kadar's, but there are exceptions. Budapest has a lot of "Turkish" fast food grills but no real Turkish restaurants. There is, however, the Secret Turkish Place Where Turkish Truck Drivers Spend their Weekends While Grounded in Budapest by the European Union's No Truck Driving on Weekends Law. Also known as the Istanbul Kebab House (Orczy ut 48) it is, basically, part of a Turkish Han complex, a place where Anatolian truck drivers chill out and sip tea and play backgammon until they can legally get back on the roads on Monday morning. It is located near the Chinese market, literally inside a Lukol station, a carwash and indoor garage off of Orczy ter in the outer 8th district.

Lahmacun: better than pizza.

They do offer the doner kebab that has become so beloved of Hungarian office workers as well as some very popular Turkish lokanta dishes (chick pea and beef stew, tas kebab, sutlac) and a killer lamb shank soup. But we come here because they bake Turkish pide and lahmacun. Really good pide and lahmacun and cheap too. FT 500 a lahmacun makes it worth a bike ride, plus we go shopping at the Chinese market when we are done.

By now we are well into the autumn: the heater is on, the sweaters are unpacked, and we are already planning our seasonal migration to the marshlands of New Jersey and the Burger And Taco highlands of the Bergen County, the hand-pulled Noodlefields of Queens, and the rich Knishlands of the Bronx. Now that will be something to blog about!

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

In Hungarian we have a term for the summer doldrums: uborkaszezon. Cucumber season. Its the time of the year that the newspapers have so little to report that they fill up their pages with feature stories on the cucumbers ripening, or the glut of zucchinis in the market, or the multimillion Euro political manipulation of the watermelon market within a one party system (this is Hungary, after all...) But there is one thing we in East Europe (or more accurately, the Eastern East Central North Balkans) have that makes summer here so enjoyable is the quality of tomatoes. Yes, the humble red emigrant from North America that comes into season around this time of year (fuck you, cucumbers!) tomatoes make summer in Hungary 600% better than summer in the United States. Because we have tomatoes. Real tomatoes.

Kalenic Piaca, Belgrade, Serbia.

The tomato in the USA are the product of so much genetic fuckery and market compromise that the original product - the tomato - has disappeared and been replaced by a uniformly pink and flavorless tennis ball shaped orb of cottony mush. Americans today can not really buy a real tomato. It simply is not available. There are some folks who do grow them, and maybe a few farmers markets that sell them, but I have not tasted a fresh tomato worthy of the name in the USA for decades. If you want to taste tomato in the USA, you get a canned Italian tomato. You can got to trendy restaurants in New York and the chef makes your salad with slices of those watery pale pink grainy, mushy tomatoes because there is no way an American chef under the age of forty is going to remember what a real tomato tastes like, much less where to get one. My brother is a chef, and he states that the taste of a modern tomato in the US is simply "wet."

Central Market, Zagreb, Croatia

When we travel around in Europe, we always make a beeline to the local open market, and since staying in a hotel rarely provides us with anyplace to actually cook, we end up eating a lot of tomatos, and then rating the countries not on their cultural success or political arguments, but simply on the quality of their salad ingredients. The absolute best? Krakow Poland in early July. Not kidding. Big whopping tasty tomatoes. Second Place: Croatia. Those folks have never played genetic Orphan Black games with their salad ingredients. Hungary barely edges out Romania in the tomato race, mainly because in Romania they still sell comically misshapen tomatoes that look like Richard Nixon's face covered with tumors, which taste great, but still....

Romania: where vegetables are still made of vegetable matter.

As we've noted before, we still have farmers markets with country folk trucking in small scale produce from family farms to sell, and a lot of them are dipping into organic produce as well. After all, the European Union supports (read "pays for") organic farming and Hungarians like anything that is "supported" even if it means growing outlandish alien vegetables they have no idea how to cook, like napa cabbage and daikon radish. Living in a Judeo-Japanese household in eastern Euope, we go through a lot of daikon and napa cabbage, but we have to ask: what the fuck do Hungarians do with these? I never see any recipes in the foodie media about how to deal with either ingredient, and yet you can buy them everywhere...

The tomatoes of the village in Moldova where my Grandfather was born.

Hungarian supermarkets basically stock cabbage, carrots, onions and potatoes, while peppers, tomatoes, and most fruit remain seasonal. When I came here in the late 80s that meant you simply did not get a fresh pepper or tomato between October and June. That has changed - greenhouses and international agribusiness have seen to that - and you can get tomatoes and peppers year round now, but we still have recourse to the farmers markets. This year we have fallen in love with the tart, dark "black tomato" which has become popular. As far as I know, these are either the Dark Crimean variety or the Carolina Black version, both of which are delicious but trigger unfortunate memories of the last USA Presidential election. Sad.

My olive oil is better than yours.

Sure, this has been a simple excuse to post a lot of photos of tomatoes on the blog... it is, after all, cucumber season. And I basically eat a half kilo of tomatoes a day during the summer. But if you have cukes and tomatoes, well, all you need is to make a salad. For that you need olive oil. And we get ours on trips to the south of us: Croatia, Slovenia, or on our latest trip, Montenegrin olive oil bought in the market in Belgrade. Because we need to eat more food that have been grown near the sound of this:

Sunday, July 09, 2017

I am a fly fisherman. I fish for trout. I am not always successful in the catching part, but the fishing for part I can handle very well. Trout fishing is not about going out and collecting fish meat for the table. You want trout for dinner, go to your local supermarket and pick up some farmed rainbow trout and grill them up! I prefer to let the wild trout be, and for the last fifty years or so most fly fishermen have adopted the practice of releasing their catch. Our trip to the Gradac river in Serbia with Claude Cahn and his lovely family was strictly a catch-and-release operation. The Gradac is home to a healthy wild strain of brown trout, with some grayling. Careful management of the fishery has made the river able to produce huge fish without resorting to tossing in stocked fish from hatcheries, and the purity of the water is such that the insect life that feed trout is extremely diverse and viable. We stayed with master fly tier Sasha Bencun who runs the Rokafly operation and guest lodge on the Gradac. Sasha maintains the river as well as drives the tiny four wheel drive jeep that negotiates the narrow donkey path down into the canyon. Why do I love fishing for trout? Because you catch trout in the most beautiful, wild places.

Fumie with a healthy Gradac brown trout.

I began fishing at five years old - dunking worms for sunfish from a pier - and, like any kid, I hated worms. Worms are disgusting, especially the horrific looking sandworms we used for catching flounder off the Bronx. You may not realize it, but New York is full of fisherfolk. It is surrounded by water, and that means its surrounded by free food. My Dad and his friends were dedicated ocean fishermen, working class Jewish New Yorkers in pursuit of the wily flounder of Long Island Sound off of City Island and Orchard Beach. After the Great Migration from the Bronx to New Jersey I found myself in a Boy Scout troop that went on fishing trips to catch bass, perch and pickerel, classic New Jersey lake fish - on worms. Say what you will about impaling living slime tubes on hooks, worms always catch fish. The grownups, however, used fly rods and caught these beautiful torpedo shaped trout, a fish that I knew only from outdoor magazines, and then they would stand around saying adult things like "Hey! Will ya look at those speckled beauties." Soon I got mixed up in the excitement of catching fish without having to vivisect worms! Most of what I knew about fly fishing came from outdoor writers born in the early 20th century, like Ray Bergman, who fished wild brook trout in natural waters a few miles outside of New York City and used tackle that predated fiberglass rods and nylon lines. I'm still a luddite when it comes to tackle. I like to keep it simple and cheap.

Claude fishing in 1896.

I used to throw huge size 6 Mickey Finn streamers and wet flies at the trout and - of course - never caught a one. It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I actually caught a trout on a fly. Once that happened, I was, ahem, hooked. I learned to tie flies (I couldn't afford to buy them) When I moved to Europe I was able to suppress the urge to catch trout for a few years, but once, while on a weekend Sixtus Kapolna pub retreat with Claude Cahn in North Hungary, we decided to (illegally) fish one of the few Hungarian streams reputed to hold trout. It did. We got away with the crime - this is Hungary, after all, and crime is legal - and since then we have been combing East Europe and Balkans looking for trout, and mucking through the sometimes arcane bureaucracy of getting a fishing permit in order to do it legally. We fished Slovakia a lot until Claude's job posted him in Serbia and he discovered Rokafly and the Gradac.

Removing a fish from the water before releasing it is actually a very bad idea.

And so we found ourselves in western Serbia last week, at the bottom of a deep canyon knee deep in cold, clear water, casting fly lines at wild brown trout the size of my leg, locked in a complex duel of wits and skill with simple vertebrates whose brains are the size of a lentil. (Trout fishing resembles politics in this aspect.) We wrote last September about visiting Valjevo, where Sasha Bencun runs the Rokafly fishing lodge. Back then fishing was slower: late season always is. This year Claude - known in Talmudic circles as the Maimonides of the Dry Fly - booked Sasha's guest house for June, prime time for trout. We arrived at the tail end of summer's first heat wave, but the canyon shaded the river and the fish were still active.

Maimonides with a heavy Gradac Brown Trout.

The Gradac is said to be one of Europe's cleanest rivers, and the trout are wild brown trout that breed in the steam - no stocked rainbows here. There are Grayling as well - not as many as in the past, since comorants - fish eating ducks - have invaded the interior of Serbia. I do not like comorants: they have pretty much ruined the fishing on my favorite Slovak stream, the Revuca. The grayling are always their first victims. Grayling have mouths on the bottom of their heads, so they don't notice dangers from above, as the trout do who feed at all stream levels. They are also somewhat less skittish than trout and tend to form schools in shallow water, making these little goobers easy prey for dive bombing ducks, which can eat two kilos of fish in a day.

So no, we did not eat any of these fish. Instead, Sasha's wife Biljana cooked up some of the best farm-fresh Serbian food imaginable: our first day lunch was a platter of grilled meats, cevapcici, chicken, and cutlets, pickled red peppers, clotted cream kaymak, cheese, salad, and fresh loaves of somun bread. Nobody would want to eat a fish instead of a Serbian grill feast.

Light lunch

Sure it isn't everyday you see two Jewish guys out fly fishing. (In Serbia this is even more rare.) Traditionally, fly fishing is a sport of the gentile elite, of English gents and Wall Street bankers, of Wyoming ranchers, guys who answer to names like Chip, and Wiley. That's what I love about fishing in the Balkans: nobody cares that the cast of Fiddler on the Roof is double hauling dry flies to the mayfly hatch at 7 AM. I don't wear much identifiable fishing gear: no waders, no fancy vest, just a baseball cap from Katz's deli. I talk to the fish in Yiddish: kim zhe arayn, reb fishl! nokh a bisl mer, reb fishl! Claude, however, is a Yekke and speaks perfect High German. He looks like the Orvis fishing company took out an advertisement in Der Sturmer.

And yet, the 19th century father of genteel British dry fly fishing, Frederic M. Halford, was Jewish. According to no less of an authority that Wikipedia, "Frederic Halford, whose first book,Floating Flies and How to Dress Them, was published in 1886 and took the upper-crust world of British fly-fishing by storm...Halford was born Frederic Michael Hyam into a wealthy Jewish family of German ancestry in 1844 in Birmingham, England."

Hymie.

Halford established the English obsession with using dry flies exclusively, and corresponded with the American outdoor writer and fisherman Theodore Gordon who imported the idea - and the flies - to the Catskill Mountains a few hours north of New York City. The Catskills region has since juggled two influential cultures: the gentleman fishermen who pursue trout in streams like the Nevesink and Delaware, and the millions of New York Jews who went to spend their summers in hotels and bungalow colonies. To this day, there are Hasidic summer colonies throughout the region. If a Jew is involved with trout fishing, it probably started in the Catskills. Our family friend, Frank Plotnik, a Warsaw Ghetto partisan veteran , taught me about bass fishing in the Catskills on vacations at the Tamarack Lodge - including the information that fish speak Yiddish. Trout are not, however, the most Jewish of fish. A Jewish fish is something you can haggle for in a fish market, something you can take home alive and keep in a bathtub until the time comes to kill, cook, and eat. Carp is a Jewish fish. Pike is a Jewish fish. The entire genus of overgrown bony minnows called "whitefish" are Jewish fish. Basically, if something is a beautiful sport fish that you can eat freshly filleted, it is not a Jewish fish. A Jewish fish is a bony, fatty fish gets chopped and denatured and extended with bread or matzoh, formed into gelatinous balls. and stuffed back into the fish skin, a practice still observed in East Europe and Turkey. The "stuffing" lends the fish its name:gefilte fish. Nowadays we more modern Jews leave out the re-stuffing of the fish skin and just eat the stuff from jars.

The Memorial to Reb Fishl.

The Talmud doesn't require any special ceremony or incantations when you dispatch a Jewish fish - just whack it on the head and begin the process of boiling, chopping, and deflavoring. The reason is that cows, sheep, or poultry are animals that live on land - and they require a shekhter - a kosher slaughter - to purify them of the baser elements that go with things that live on earth (such as Fox News, Domino's Pizza, Ebola virus, and Senator Paul Ryan.) Fish, living in purer water, merely need to be "gathered." No blessing, no pricey rabbinical presence, just scale 'em, fry 'em, and you are good to go.

Saturday, May 13, 2017

If you have been keeping up with the news lately, you have probably worked up an vicious appetite. Nothing gets me in the mood for lunch like reading about the evaporation of democracy in Hungary, the land in which I have lived for nearly three decades. Last week our feisty Prime Miniature got his ass handed to him by the EU after deciding to shut down CEU University. The Hungarian news is overwhelmed with the Prime Munchkin lashing out at billionaire philanthropist George Soros, echoing Orwell "Snowball is the Enemy! Four legs good, two legs better!" Meanwhile, back in the Old Country World Wrestling Federation sponsor Donald Trump kayfabes his way into a de facto coup against American democracy. I have no place left to run. At times like these, it is good to shrink one's perspective. If I can't run, at least I can hide! I've become very local. Like what is within a few minutes of my front door local. If I don't have to, I don't leave home.

The pickle shop has, alas, closed down.It was... upstairs...

Luckily, I live in the seventh district of Budapest, in Klauzál tér, which means that I live in the exact center of the universe. Klauzál tér (tér means square) is traditionally the center of Budapest's Jewish community. The neighborhood was walled off into the Budapest Ghetto in World War II - the last remaining bit of wall is located down the street beneath my bedroom window. Today Bollywood and Kung Fu films shoot their "European" scenes on the street below me (Jackie Chan's crew was out last weekend!) where at night French hippie tourists scream and howl while crawling from bar to bar. Unlike many of Europe's touristic Potemkin Village "Jewish Neighborhoods" (Kazimierz comes to mind) we still are a Jewish nabe full of living, breathing Jews, although there is little to show tourists if you don't know what to look for. There are Hasids living along the street, a mikvah nearby, about four shuls with five blocks, and the kosher butcher is just down the street - I get my beef hot dogs there.

The Kosher stamp of approval.

And the building I live in, like most of the buildings around here, was designated a Yellow Star building during WWII, meaning that Jews were allowed to officially reside in it. The park across the street offers a bit of open space, a playground, a dog walking area, and a mass grave dating from the Arrow Cross massacres of 1944.

The Jewish spirit of the area do not mean that you can't find anything unkosher: this is Hungary, after all, and Hungarian Jews are probably the largest illicit Jewish comsumers of pork outside of... well... Brooklyn? And besides, Hungarians live here too, lots of 'em, especially Roma people, who have no - absolutely no - aversion to pig meat. After WWII a lot of the local apartments were left empty - their Jewish owners had been killed in Auschwitz or survived and left Europe for good. Roma from Eastern Hungary were brought in to do the heavy drudge labor of clearing the bomb rubble from the streets of the city and were allocated the newly empty flats: before 1945 Gypsies were not given residence permits to live within the boundaries of Budapest itself, with the exception of Roma employed as musicians (which explains the large Roma communities in the suburbs just outside of Budapest in Fót or Pomáz) This led to the unique social mix of the seventh district: a Jewish-Gypsy social alliance (that means they fucked a lot) that played out in music, family ties, food, and a particularly Budapest subdialect that layered Hungarian syntax with mixed Yiddish and Romani vocabulary.

Right across the street from us is the Klauzál tér Market. We have been shopping daily there since the day it reopened in 2014. The lower level shops and fresh vegetable stalls do a brisk business, while the upper level is a hopeless life-sucking black hole for small businesses. Local politicos seem to be involved in the operation of the place, which explains why many of the smaller businesses that open up here seem to fail within a month or two: The "Specialities of Békes County" shop that offered bags of shitty dried noodles and paprika, the Fresh Squeezed Expensive Juice shop.... lasted a week, the World's Saddest Fish Store not even that long. A promised poultry retailer was represented by a single xeroxed paper stuck to a wall announcing "Poultry Store opening soon" before it gave way to a shop selling pillows, which lasted a week. The Lángos stand seems to be the only thing that has managed to stay open upstairs, inexplicably popular with the howling French hippies we mentioned before. A new place opened up in the Invisible Corner of Retail Death on the upper level, a butcher shop from Debrecen offering quality meat and house made debreceni sausages and other butcher goodies to take out or eat in: I haven't tried it yet, because to get there you have to pass by Palibácsi's Étkezde, the lunch place that has stolen my heart.

$5 light lunch for two.

Palibácsi- "Uncle Paulie" - is a real, old school Hungarian butcher, the kind that has strong opinions on what makes a good kolbász or a hurka and what a Magyar likes to have for lunch: meaty, greasy, fatty and delicious, The difference is that he produces certified organic meat, which he used to sell in the weekely organic market in posh Buda. In Klauzál market he runs an étkezde in the far corner of the first level offering a selection of the traditional Hungarian lunch house fare: stews swimming in paprika red sauce, funky peasant noodle dishes that would never soil the menus of a fancy downtown restaurant, and best of all, real artisanal hurka.

Egy májas és egy véres - a liver and a blood sausage, please.

Hurka are the meaty link that tied me to Hungarian identity while I was growing up in New york. Every few months or so my mom would take us to Yorkville, the now vanished Hungarian neighborhood of Manhattan along the east 80s on Second Avenue, to stock up on paprika and other essentials at the legendary Paprikas Weiss Hungarian delicatessen shop, and while there we would visit one of the many Hungarian butchers in the neighborhood, bringing home goodies like kolbász and hurka. Besides my Mom, I was the only one who would eat hurka. Fun fact: the two things that brought me to Hungary back in the 1980s were essentially unlimited supplies of hurka and goatskin Hungarian bagpipes. I wasn't in search of high culture.

Hurka comes in two forms: stuffed with either liver (májas) or blood (véres) with rice and spices, or in the case of German Schvab style hurka, with bread crumbs.The problem with hurka these days (and yes, there is a problem with hurka) is that nearly all places selling it get it from one of the giant meat processing plants, and almost all taste the same and almost all are crap. You have to search the markets to find butchers who make their own and take some pride in their product. I have nearly given up on finding an edible debreceni sausage in Budapest anymore: the modern product is a mere orange hot dog, nothing like the meaty, spicy sausage I remember from my youth in 16th century Hungary.

The thing we love about the Klauzál market is that we have gotten to know almost all of the folks we buy our food from. We are in there nearly every day. The vegetable sellers know us, the butchers inquire as to our health and take our special orders for oddball cuts to use in Asian recipes, and the bakery knows our daily order even before we get to the counter.

One day Palibácsi came to our table to ask us what we thought of the next day's menu: did we prefer meatballs in vegetable and sour cream sauce (NO!) or beef stroganoff (YES!). The next day both were offered. Like a lot of the places around Klauzál tér Palibácsi's Étkezde is only open for lunch. Almost next door to the market is the legendary Kadar Étkezde, and on the other side if the fantastic Serbian Cevapcici and Pleskavica shop Pola Pola. We will be revealing their secrets in short order as well. I realize that while I travel a lot, there has been less info on this blog about what to eat well in Budapest itself, For that you have to know the butcher's secrets. How, you may ask, do I know the guarded secrets of the Hungarian Butchers. Well.... my grandfather was one, my uncle was one, and my brother is one. While I can't actually dismember an animal myself (beyond peeling the skin off a goat for bagpipes) a lot of my family members could. My Grandfather was a quartermaster - a regimental butcher - in the 19th Jasz-Kun Husszar Regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI. Yes, WW One. You ate what you could find and you liked it, even if it was a moose shot someplace on the frontline in Galicia.